Every year around this time of the year great masses of IT people come to the Mandalay Bay Hotel And Conference center to attend IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) Conference. It is a good place to learn the latest and greatest and to network. This year is the first year we have a significant Cloud [...]Read More »

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Oracle kills Virtual Iron. Is MySQL next?You can wait and see if Oracle will put MySQL on death row like it just did with Virtual Iron, or you can get ahead of the curve and start to plan for the alternatives like getting in touch with alternative MySQL support providers or take a look at DB2 Express-C and see if that is the right way for you to go.

Comparing Free Databases: Oracle XE vs IBM DB2 Express-C 2 years laterWith Oracle's acquisition of MySQL it is quite clear that Oracle XE is at the end of its road. DB2 Express-C on the other hand has been continuously enhanced with cutting edge features. And unlike Oracle XE which takes you to a dead end, DB2 Express-C provides a very clear growth path that wil take your application where it needs to be no matter how big its needs to be and how fast it needs to get there. I believe that with MySQL replacing of Oracle XE at the low end of the portfolio, it makes more sense to compare DB2 Express-C to MySQL than Oracle XE. I think I will do just that in one of my future posts. I will say, however, that with today's price reduction for DB2 Express, MySQL is at a big disadvantage.

Learn Hadoop for Free and Go to Las Vegas ... All Expenses PaidBigDataUniversity provides free @your pace @your place education in Hadoop, MapReduce and other Big Data technologies. In addition to free courses, students also get free study materials and products to do hands on exercises. At this time we are running Hadoop Programming Chalenge that will send 3 lucky participants on an all expenses paid trip to the IOD Conference October 23-27 in Las Vegas.

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Self-service data warehouse on cloud helping IT deal with application backlogOn November 4, 2013 at the IOD Conference we are going to make available for early access BLU Acceleration for Cloud. This is a self-service data warehousing and business intelligence and analytics solution. It is built on the premise of empowering business users with the tools and access to data they need to win in the market. It frees data out of “data jail” that many enterprise data warehouses have become yet it lets IT retain control and ensure security and compliance. I like to think of BLU Acceleration for Cloud as democratizing data warehousing and analytics – capabilities that have traditionally been available to a privileged few.
Over the course of the next few weeks I will be posting a series of blog posts describing BLU Acceleration for Cloud but if you want to sneak a peek now, point your browser to http://bluforcloud.com/technology-preview.

What is Big Data anyway?IT industry's penchant for trends is eclipsed only by that of the fashion industry. The latest IT fashion is big data. As with most trendy topics, there is no shortage of pundits who will espose their views on the subject. I happen to be curating a daily electronic paper called All About Big Data and I am overwhelmed with the volume of writing on the subject of big data. Unfortunately, much of this writing is nothing more than self serving chest beating by major IT vendors. Not a day goes by without someone asking me "so, what is so different about big data?" This is the first in a series of posts that will be focused on coming up with a non nonsense easy to understand by meere mortals explanation.